The world of baseball was shocked on Monday as it learned some controversial projections.
Baseball-Reference, a leading source of information about our beloved game, published its projected AL East standings and had the New York Yankees winning 71 games.
That would mean a 71-91 record: it has been decades since they were that bad.
To be more specific, the last time they had such a record was in 1991: 33 years ago.
Fans couldn’t believe how such a respected site would project such a lousy season for a team that added Juan Soto, Marcus Stroman, Trent Grisham, Alex Verdugo, Caleb Ferguson, Victor Gonzalez and others to an 82-win team.
However, it’s nothing personal against the Yankees: it’s just how their model works.
At the end of the day, these are all projections, and no one will know how the Yankees will fare until the season is over.
There is an explanation behind the model and the lousy projection, though.
“There’s a big aggregator account showing that b-ref projects the Yankees to lose 90+ this year, but that’s not really how those numbers work. It doesn’t know Soto is there or anything about the roster. It’s just based on their last 100 (bad) games,” MLB analyst Mike Petriello tweeted.
There's a big aggregator account showing that b-ref projects the Yankees to lose 90+ this year, but that's not really how those numbers work. It doesn't know Soto is there or anything about the roster. It's just based on their last 100 (bad) games. pic.twitter.com/NkCTcvMxKv
— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) March 26, 2024
There it is.
The model doesn’t account for the Yankees’ roster improvements.
They also have memory of the last 100 regular-season games, and the Yankees went 46-54 in those.
They experienced a collapse of sorts when Aaron Judge went down with his toe injury, and could never truly recover until very late in the season.
That’s why B-Ref projects such a bad performance from them this year.
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